15, 16 and 17 make it sound like the guy is a party animal who requires constant human contact but refuses to experience his friends playing music, prepared to guilt trip them into accompanying him as he drinks himself into an early grave.

Maybe this article is a very craftily disguised cry for help?

Anyway, the whole ‘introducing a topic you want to talk about, without disguising it as having emerged from the conversation naturally’, is the major failing.

If you really don’t want to be accused of (or perceived as) being a dick for talking to people you know about things that interest you; get new friends.

I think the thing is to not volunteer these sorts of things in conversation where it isn’t warranted.

Just don’t constantly derail the conversation and make it about you and your experiences. I mean that’s just normal conversation skills for non-douchebags.

The #3 “I don’t own a TV” crowd is particularly notorious for that, as well as the #6 “When I was in Europe…” crowd. Since the other things on the list are really not that bad, it’s true that they’re going to make you sound like an ass if you say them at inappropriate times.

I’m guilty of several things on this list (sometimes in slightly different forms), and I know for a fact that people sometimes find me to be insufferable for this and other reasons. So I don’t find the article to be completely off-base by any means

I find it annoying when a person specifically clicks on a link about a TV show and then offers, “I don’t own a TV”. But in the context of a very different conversation, in person, if you are rambling on about a program on TV, and that person responds the same way, it’s not really being a tool, it’s signaling that they can’t contribute to the discourse and aren’t interested. I think context is everything. I like dark chocolate better than other chocolates, but I’m not going to spew it out non sequitur, like Rainman saying, “I’m an excellent driver”. I might mention it if offered a choice of chocolate.

They forgot “I work in academia”… or the use of any academic terms in non-academic conversation… That pisses lots of people off I’ve found, but they just don’t realize that I don’t want to bring Foucault or Marx into this 2 way conversation, but given that I’ve read about 200 books that do nothing but namecheck them in the past few months… at some point, you can’t help it. It’s kind of sad really. We need help… Help me. I’m trapped under a major pile of academic works. But I’m useless in the real world… so there is that.